1 Introduction

1 Introduction In June 2010 the British cultural institution Tate held its annual Summer Party. It was a prestigious affair. Guests were greeted and tickets were inspected at the main entrance. Notables on the guest list included the art historian Wendy Baron, the Duran Duran keyboardist Nick Rhodes, the artist, author and Marquess of Bath Alexander Thynn, and the Conservative party faithfuls Virginia and Peter Bottomley. Smiles and nods from smartly dressed staff directed them up the stairs into Tate Britain’s impressive and expansive Duveen Galleries, where silver service staff standing in a perfect ‘V’ were holding shiny trays and offering each new arrival a flute of champagne. The party hosted a cast of characters crucial to the story of Artwash. Nicholas Serota, Tate Director, and John Browne, ex-CEO of BP and Tate Chair of Trustees, were both holding court. Penelope Curtis was centre stage; as director of Tate Britain she curated the exhibition of Fiona Banner’s artwork that formed the party’s centrepiece. Nearby: Iwona Blazwick, once Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate and now Director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London – the position Serota held before stepping up the cultural professional’s ladder – and Anna Cutler, the newly appointed Head of Learning. Around them party goers surveyed Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar, decommissioned fighter jets suspended through the 100 metre-long gallery, and accepted offers of sausages on sticks. It was an opportunity to rub shoulders or take ‘selfies’ with some prominent individuals. Christopher Frayling, a previous director of Arts Council England, and Colin Tweedy, a lobbyist for corporate sponsorship of the arts, each would have made an appearance, as would the artistic directors from other BP- and Shell-sponsored galleries, 1 Evans A 01 text 1 10/02/2015 07:54 artwash such as Jude Kelly of the Southbank Centre and Sandy Nairne of the National Portrait Gallery. There was a light accompaniment of live music heard underneath the buzz of chattering guests. Tate holds the party annually but on that particular occasion Tate directors elected to use the event to mark 20 years of BP sponsorship of Tate’s group of four art galleries spread around the UK. And meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill that had begun on 20 April 2010 was still splurging from the seabed as party guests gathered at Tate Britain on the River Thames in London. Outside of the party, the world’s eyes were fixed on BP’s gigantic spill as it spun out of control. It would take 87 days to cork the blowout but on 28 June, the night of Tate’s party, no one knew how long the ruinous spill might last. Unbeknown to the party planners beforehand, a number of unlisted guests were making their way to Tate Britain that evening, and not merely to gatecrash in pursuit of Pimm’s and nibbles. Entering the building stage right at 7.15pm: Anna Feigenbaum and me, both part of the freshly formed Liberate Tate. We arrived ready to make a spill performance we created with climate activists Danni Paffard and Beth Whelan – Beth, Anna and I shared intertwined histories experimenting in art and activism, which for Anna was in parallel with a media studies lectureship and authoring the book Protest Camps, and for Beth and me this was our chosen path concurrent to our contemporaries’ entry on to the Glasgow and London theatre scenes. Anna and I, naming ourselves Toni (Hayward) and Bobbi (Dudley) after the outgoing and incoming BP CEOs – we are also one English and one American performer – entered the party just like the other guests, with heads turning at our large floral vintage bouffant dresses. Invisible to the casual passer-by, we were carrying ten litres of oil-like molasses into the gallery under our skirts, held in easily rippable rubble sacks attached to our hips with remarkably transferable strap-on harnesses. When we reached the entrance to the ‘V’ of the champagne reception, we spilled our precious cargo across the polished stone floor of the gallery. Across the Atlantic BP was attempting to plug the dire spill, and here at Tate we replicated their messy clean-up mission. We donned the BP ponchos hidden in our handbags and attempted to contain our spill 2 Evans A 01 text 2 10/02/2015 07:54 introduction Figure 1.1: Toni & Bobbi, Liberate Tate, June 2010, Tate Britain. Film stills. Video credit: Gavin Grindon, 2010. 3 Evans A 01 text 3 10/02/2015 07:54 artwash with our nail-polished hands and classy party shoes, as we described the mess to our gathered audience as ‘tiny in comparison to the size of the whole gallery’, echoing Tony Hayward’s widely criticised initial defence of the BP disaster. Gavin Grindon, who lectures in art history at the University of Essex and curated Disobedient Objects at the V&A, joined us inside as videographer of our spill performance. Then, at 7.25pm a group of twelve performers in black clothing, with black veils reminiscent of Catholic widows in mourning covering their faces, poured more oil-like molasses from BP canisters at the main entrance to Tate Britain, as the guests continued to arrive. The spill seeped down the steps and across the entranceway, silent itself but eliciting gasps from the gathered crowd. In the group were Isa Fremeaux and John Jordan from the ever-inspiring art and activism collective the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, who were key to the catalysing of Liberate Tate; artists Hannah Davey, Tim Ratcliffe and Darren Sutton who with several more artists and activists went on to form the core of the Liberate Tate art collective and create many more interventions in the space and the discourse; and other performers who founded new groups such as Shell Out Sounds and the Reclaim Shakespeare Company to call out oil sponsorship in different museums and galleries. The twelve figures upon emptying their barrels turned and calmly walked away, a steady procession of graceful objection. These acts, among others by the group, brought the distant spill into greater physical and discursive proximity to the BP logos at Tate. Remaining at the scene were over fifty people, who were part of a wider movement opposing oil sponsorship of the arts – Art Not Oil. A group of artists and activists held hand-crafted placards declaring ‘Artists are angry’ and interpreted the spill performances for guests: in the bunch was Matthew Todd, the editor of Attitude magazine, the performance artist Hayley Newman who later joined the hub of Liberate Tate, and the artist and educator Jane Trowell from Platform, an organisation that is a long-standing critic and creative provocateur of oil and its cultures. Platform’s press officer Kevin Smith ferried himself between soundbites and interviews, and videographer Tom Costello captured every splash. Many of the artists who had gathered had signed 4 Evans A 01 text 4 10/02/2015 07:54 introduction Figure 1.2: Licence to Spill, Liberate Tate, June 2010, Tate Britain. Photo credit: Immo Klink, 2010. a letter in The Guardian that day, calling for an end to BP sponsorship of Tate. Signatories to the letter included the playwright Caryl Churchill and the artists Sonia Boyce, Hans Haacke and Suzanne Lacy. A chorus of voices critical of alliances between art and oil in the city has since risen up, and oil sponsorship of the arts is becoming increasingly controversial in the UK and around the world. Soon after novelist Margaret Atwood expressed concerns about Shell sponsorship of the Southbank Centre in a presentation of her work revolving around art and climate change, the Southbank Centre’s five-year-long sponsorship deal with Shell came to a close. Artwash will visit art museums around the world where Big Oil – the multinational power glut of petroleum conglomerates – has made an appearance. Of the galleries in London that accept oil sponsorship, it is Tate with which I am most intimately engaged. The changing exhibitions always bring something new to my attention with clarity and depth. Tate’s vast collection of surrealist work is a real treasure and the Beuys exhibits remain a favourite. The buildings themselves are part of the delight: Tate Britain on Millbank, London; Tate Modern at Bankside, London; Tate Liverpool on the docks, Liverpool; and Tate St. Ives, on the sea 5 Evans A 01 text 5 10/02/2015 07:54 artwash shore in Cornwall. Each one is distinct, but the four share a certain spacious, sacred – yet somehow not overly pretentious – core. The first time I visited Tate Britain the BP logos remained at the margins of my perception, but once the corporate message registered, my visiting experience changed. I’m glad of this – I want to be clear about how often visits to Tate incur regular, delicate imprints in my mind of a green and yellow ‘helios’. This is the reason I set out to examine here the impact of oil branding in the art museum, with reflection on the various galleries around the world that accept oil sponsorship. I do this from a position connected to Liberate Tate, Platform and Art Not Oil, without wishing to speak for all involved in this movement but rather aiming to reflect some questions back at the picture we are collabora- tively painting. From the Thames, via the Atlantic, to the Gulf, the tides connected the two sites of Tate’s party and BP’s catastrophic spill. The link was both fluid, via the oceans, and solid, in BP share value, because BP’s relationship with Tate was fundamental to the company’s survival of the disaster.

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